‘It sucks’: Senators fume over McConnell’s tight grip

SomeRepublicans say Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell gets frustrated when he can’t get Democrats to work with him. On other occasions, they say, the GOP leader seems happy to have the chamber under his thumb. | J. Scott Applewhite/AP Photo

Republican John Kennedy has served in the Senate a full 15 months — and not once received a roll call vote on one of his legislative amendments.

“I think it sucks,” the Louisiana senator fumed as Congress headed home in March for a two-week recess. The Senate has voted on only six amendments this year.

Story Continued Below

“All I hear is, ‘Well, it’s not done that way,’” Kennedy said of his call for a more robust debate of ideas on the Senate floor. “Well, the way we’ve been doing it for a long time sucks.”

When Mitch McConnell took over as majority leader in 2015 after years in the minority, he vowed to make good on a central campaign pledge of returning to a more “free-wheeling” Senate. And in the early days of his tenure, he did: McConnell presided over open, raucous floor debate on the Keystone XL Pipeline, winning praise even from some Democrats.

But the Senate has reverted to form. The body has taken just 25 roll call votes on so-called binding amendments so far during this two-year Congress, a sharp decrease from the 154 amendments voted on by this point during the 114th Congress under BarackObama. Each year since McConnell took over, the Senate has voted on fewer nonbudget amendments: 140 in 2015, 57 in 2016, 19 in 2017 and six so far this year.

“There’s a lot of weeks I’m not sure why I show up,” said Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.).

Sign up here for POLITICO Huddle

A daily play-by-play of congressional news in your inbox.

Email

By signing up you agree to receive email newsletters or alerts from POLITICO. You can unsubscribe at any time.

The number of amendment votes is a key barometer of the amount, if not the quality, of debate in the Senate. And the Senate’s increasingly lackluster debate, after McConnell promised the opposite,underscores both the limits to his power as majority leader and the pitfalls of making promises while in the minority of how different things would be if he were in charge.

The paucity of votes was caused in part by McConnell’s strategy of pursuing a partisan agenda in2017 that didn’t need Democratic support. But it also reflects a lack of cooperation between the two Senate leaders. Don Stewart, a spokesman for McConnell, said the Kentucky Republican “can and does make it easy” for senators to vote on amendments, but he blamed Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) for adoptingthen-Majority Leader Harry“Reid’s anti-amendment strategy” of shielding vulnerable senators from tough votes.

The figures in this story are based on a POLITICO analysis that encompasses amendments proposed by individual senators but that excludes repeat votes on individual amendments. It also leaves out amendments to budget resolutions, which don’t become law and can’t be limited by the majority leader.

McConnell can boast that he’s held three budget debates during his tenure as majority leader, with votes on106 nonbinding amendments; Democrats repeatedly shirked writing a budget under Reid.But those amendments are effectively messaging proposals. And McConnell’s budgets were all intended to set up partisan votes on repealing Obamacare or overhauling the tax code while skirting Democrats’ filibuster. He does not intend to passabudget this year.

Overall, the Senate under President Donald Trump is beginning to resemble the last two years of a Democratic majority in 2013 and 2014, when Reid (D-Nev.) wasaccused by one Republican of running the Senate like a “plantation.”

In the previous decade, under both Democratic and Republican majorities, the Senate regularly voted on 300 or more binding and nonbinding amendments, according to the Congressional Research Service.

But now, “Democrats didn’t want to vote on amendments when they were in the majority, and they really don’t want to vote on amendments in the minority,” Stewart said.

Schumer spokesman Matt House said McConnell has failed to uphold his pledges to open up the debate process.

“The numbers don’t lie. The fact is that Sen. McConnell has repeatedly blocked amendment votes on the few pieces of legislation we’ve considered in the Senate,” House said.

There’s blame to go around on both sides: A truly open process requires the cooperation of all 100 senators; a single obstinate lawmaker can consume hours or days of floor time.

And distrust is now so high among senators that some members won’t allow a vote on a colleague’s amendment unless they get one on theirs.

“We’ve sort of degenerated into [this] situation,” said Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn (R-Texas). “We’re not very good at self-restraint.”

Further curbing floor time is the fact that the Senate, unlike the House, has to spend months each year confirming nominees. So if Democrats use Senate rules to delay nominees, Republicans say it becomes almost impossible to use the floor for legislation and amendments.

“One of the frustrating things is, in my efforts to get bills to the Senate floor, the answer is often: ‘We’ve got to get these confirmations complete,’” said Sen. Jerry Moran (R-Kan.).

Of course, the Senate rarely works on Fridays and takes regular recesses, another culprit for the lack of amendment votes.

The lack of debate is chafing at senators, particularly newer members who have never gotten an up-or-down vote on their proposals.

“What amendment process?” asked Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto (D-Nev.). “I am being told by my colleagues that are senior here that this is not regular order. But it is becoming regular order.”

Senators are also writing fewer amendments, according to research from James Wallner, a fellow at the right-leaning R Street Institute and a former director of the conservative Republican Steering Committee. Through September, senators filed just 1,090 amendments, putting the chamber on pace to introduce far fewer than the 5,125 amendments in the preceding two-year Congress.

When a massive omnibus spending bill came up last month, senators had been conditioned to simply assume there would be no amendments. The package dropped days before the government was set to shut down, and by the time it arrived in the Senate there was no opportunity to change anything without risking a funding lapse.

Some Republicans are discussing reforms to the Senate that could conceivably ease the gridlock. One idea would eliminate one of two available filibuster opportunities on spending bills. Another would slash the number of hours a nominee can be delayed.

SomeRepublicans say McConnell sometimes gets frustrated when he can’t get Democrats to work with him on opening up debate. But on other occasions, they say, the Republican leader seems happy to have the chamber under his thumb on critical issues like government funding.

“There are times where I suspect the leader wants to be able to control,” said Sen. Mike Rounds (R-S.D.). “But there have been a number of times where he’s said we’re trying to do an open amendment process.”

McConnell says “he wants to get out of this [standoff] and feels stuck with it,” said Sen. James Lankford (R-Okla.).

Wallner sees thing differently. The decline in amendments and debate, he said, “is entirely on McConnell.”

Two episodes this year underscore the Senate’s long fall from the heights of 2015, when McConnell eclipsed Reid’s 2014 amendment total in a matter of weeks. On a banking deregulation bill in March, liberal senators were eager to amend a bill they hated, with Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) preparing more than a dozen changes.

But those votes could have poisoned the compromise struck by Republicans and moderate Democrats, while putting vulnerable Democrats up for reelection in a tight spot. In the end, there was no open amendment process.

In February, McConnell promised Democrats an open immigration debate after they agreed to provide votes to reopen the government a month earlier. He kept his word by allowing immigration legislation on the floor, but the chamber sat in quorum calls — literally doing nothing as senators’ names were read aloud — while some senators negotiated privately.

Four immigration proposals received votes at the end of the week, and all four failed. It was the most votes on amendments the chamber had taken since December.

In both instances, spokesmen for McConnell and Schumer blamed the other leader. But many senators are sick of the finger-pointing.

“I was worn out after that 13-minute immigration debate,” Kennedy said sarcastically. “I had to go take a nap.”